Climate Change - Will Drive You Nuts, Really.

It's something that's been getting a lot of attention lately - the emotional, psychological overload being experienced by climate scientists and advocates having to deal, up close, day in and day out, with the reality of what is happening to our world.

An article in today's Sydney Morning Herald (via WaPo) explores how those most intimately involved in the field are struggling to cope in a world that really doesn't seem to care. They're coming down with a form of post traumatic stress disorder now sometimes labelled "climate trauma."

One victim is American professor, Camille Parmesan, who eventually had to find refuge across the Atlantic, in England.

As recently as 2009, Camille Parmesan had a career that most scientists can only dream of.

That year, the University of Texas professor was named one of Atlantic Monthly's 27 "Brave Thinkers" for her efforts to save species whose habitats are threatened by climate change.

...But beneath the acclaim, Parmesan recalls, her work left her "professionally depressed" and panicked — so much so that she eventually abandoned her life in the United States for a new one on the other side of the Atlantic, according to the environmental news website Grist.

"To be honest, I panicked 15 years ago — that was when the first studies came out showing that Arctic tundras were shifting from being a net sink to being a net source of CO2," she told Esquire's John Richardson for a recent piece about the emotional toll of climate science. "That along with the fact this butterfly I was studying shifted its entire range across half a continent — I said this is big, this is big. Everything since then has just confirmed it."

Today, Parmesan is a professor at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom, where, she told Grist, she is no longer forced to spend the first half of her talks convincing audiences that climate change is real.

,,,As climate change accelerates, weather patterns around the world become more extreme and models become more dire, scientists find themselves fighting a war on two fronts. The first battleground is a professional one and carries with it the burden of charting humanity's potential demise, all while enduring targeted attacks that, according to Esquire, include "death threats, summonses from a hostile Congress, attempts to get them fired, legal harassment, and intrusive discovery demands so severe they had to start their own legal-defence fund."

The second front is a personal one and involves finding ways to maintain hopefulness when days are spent digging into apocalyptic scenarios that go largely unnoticed — or fiercely dismissed — by the general public.

"So many of us are exhibiting all the signs and symptoms of post-traumatic disorder — the anger, the panic, the obsessive intrusive thoughts," Dr Lise Van Susteren, a practicing psychiatrist and climate activist, told Esquire.

Among them is Gillian Caldwell, a human rights activist and former director of WITNESS, who has investigated human trafficking in Russia and rape as a tool of war in Sierra Leone. And yet, Caldwell writes, her efforts to get her country to tackle global warming remain the most emotionally demanding task she's ever performed.

Sometimes the struggle is as simple as going outside and looking up at the sky. In a tear-filled interview about "climate advocacy trauma," Caldwell says that one of the sacrifices climate activists make is never being able to experience weather the same way again.

...Adding to the mounting stress faced by climate change scientists is the inevitable backlash they can expect to encounter from unqualified critics of their research, according to Jeffrey Kiehl, a senior scientist for climate change research at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.

"How would that make you feel?" Kiehl told Grist. "You take this information to someone and they say they don't believe you, as if it's a question of beliefs. I'm not talking about religion here, I'm talking about facts. It's equivalent to a doctor doing extremely detailed observations on someone and concluding that someone needed to have an operation, and the person looks at the doctor and says, 'I don't believe you.' How would a doctor feel in that moment, not think, but feel in that moment?"

"I don't know of a single scientist that's not having an emotional reaction to what is being lost," Parmesan is quoted as saying in the report, in reference to an ocean reef she has spent more than a decade studying. "It's gotten to be so depressing that I'm not sure I'm going to go back to this particular site again, because I just know I'm going to see more and more of it dead, and bleached, and covered with brown algae."

Dr Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State University, told Esquire that climate-change deniers have demoralised his colleagues, leaving one suicidal. Despite promising developments, such as increased public awareness and the recent agreement between the United States and China on emissions, Mann continues to battle nightmares and struggle under the weight of his own environmental awareness.

He has broken down in front of his students and can't shake the fears he has about his daughter living in an alien planet that no longer resembled the one she was born into.

"I don't want her to have to be sad," Mann told Esquire. "And I almost have to believe we're not yet there, where we are resigned to this future."

 

Yet look around and you'll see compelling signs that we are indeed "resigned to this future." Here in Canada none of the mainstream parties is prepared to break with our extractive, fossil fuel industries.  Not one will even talk about shutting that down and moving Canada into a post-carbon future.  Not Harper, not Trudeau, not Mulcair.  

They're not stupid men.  They've heard the warnings, the scientific consensus that, if our grandkids and future generations that will follow, are to have a reasonable chance at any viable life, we need to leave most fossil fuels and all of the really high-carbon fossil fuels in the ground, untouched.  They know that transitioning into a decarbonized society and economy is the only hope these future generations have and yet we're writing their fate indelibly today sacrificing the future to the immediate demands of partisan political opportunism.

Why do they do it?  That's easy. It's because you, me, all of us let them get away with it.  If you're a Lib you'll vote for Justin. If you're a New Dem you won't let it stop you from voting for Mulcair. And with every ballot cast, we're proving that we are indeed "resigned to this future."